Pauli Murray: Queer Episcopalian saint who stood for racial and gender equality

Human rights champion and queer saint Pauli Murray is a renowned civil rights pioneer, feminist, author, Episcopal priest and lawyer whose legal arguments were used in landmark Supreme Court decisions outlawing racism and sexism. Murray’s feast day is July 1.

[Update: On Feb. 1, 2023, the U.S. Mint announced that Pauli Murray will appear on U.S. coins in 2024 as part of the American Women Quarters program.]

Murray’s gender identity is under debate. The gender non-conformist is widely acclaimed as “the first black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest.” She was attracted to women and had the longest relationships with women, so is justifiably considered a lesbian. But Murray also sometimes identified as a man and sought masculinizing hormone treatments, so there are good reasons to consider him to be a transgender man.

Murray was arrested and jailed for refusing to sit in the back of a segregated bus in Virginia in 1938 — 15 years before Rosa Parks became a national symbol for resisting bus segregation. This makes Murray the first African American to use non-violent action to challenge Jim-Crow segregation. A little-known fact is that Murray was with dressed as a man at the time of the arrest, and was arrested along with girlfriend Adelene “Mac” McBean. In 1941 Murray organized restaurant sit-downs in the nation’s capital — 20 years before the famous Greensboro sit-ins.

This non-binary person was permanently added as an Episcopal saint in 2018 after being on the calendar of saints for “trial use” since 2009. Usually the Episcopalians wait until 50 years after a person has died before making granting sainthood, but the church made an exception and fast-tracked Murray on the road to sainthood.

The saint faced many obstacles in life, but often overcame them with the extraordinary attitude expressed in these quotes: “Don’t get mad, get smart” and “When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.”

This article follows the current standard among most historians and uses “she-her-hers” pronouns for Murray — the same pronouns that Murray used — while acknowledging that as new understandings evolve, a few scholars are starting to use “they/them/theirs” or “he-him-his” pronouns for Murray. Out of respect for multiple interpretations, this article reduces the use of pronouns in an attempt to let readers make their own decisions.

For more on the pronoun issue, see the articles “What about Pauli Murray and pronouns?” by the Pauli Murray Center and “Pauli Murray and the Pronominal Problem: a De-essentialist Trans Historiography” by Naomi Simmons-Thorne, and and the video “Gender Pronouns and The Life and Legacy of Pauli Murray” with Rosalind Rosenberg.

Pauli Murray struggled with gender since childhood Others have written extensively about the saint’s many accomplishments, but material on Murray’s sexuality is harder to find. She did not speak publicly about sexual orientation or gender identity issues, but left ample evidence of these struggles in letters and personal writings.

Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray (Nov. 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was born in Baltimore, Maryland into a family of mixed racial origins on both sides. She was sent to Durham, North Carolina, when at age three when her mother died, and raised by her maternal aunts and grandparents.

The child became aware of having a queer sexuality and/or identity early in life. In Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White, historian Anne Firor Scott explains:

“In adolescence Murray began to worry about her sexual nature. She later said that she was probably meant to be a man, but had by accident turned up in a woman’s body. She began to keep clippings about various experiments with hormones as a way of changing sexual identity…. In 1937, at the initiative of a friend, she had been admitted to Bellevue Hospital in New York, and during her stay there she examined her worries about her sexual nature in writing, and said that she hoped to move toward her masculine side… . She continued for years to discuss the developing medical literature about hormones, thinking they might help her. She discussed the possibility of homosexuality with doctors; she knew that she was attracted to very feminine, often white, women, and she knew as well that… she was not physically attracted to men. This conflict would continue for the rest of her life.”

One of the most comprehensive accounts of Murray’s inner life — including struggles against racism, homophobia, transphobia — comes in the 2020 biography “Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life” by Troy R. Saxby. He is an academic and research officer at the University of Newcastle. This intimate biography is published by University of North Carolina Press.

These issues are also explored in the definitive 2017 biography, “Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray” by Columbia University history professor Rosalind Rosenberg. Murray coined the phrase “Jane Crow,” based on the term “Jim Crow,” to describe the double discrimination faced by black women. While serving on a presidential commission on women in the 1960s, she used the idea of “Jane Crow” to show similarities between racial and gender discrimination, decades before the concept of “intersectionality” became popular.

Rosenberg writes that Murray had an inner sense of being male since childhood, admitted to “homosexual tendencies” and tried unsuccessfully to convince doctors to administer testosterone in an effort to “treat” homosexuality by making Murray more male.

Murray also requested and was denied exploratory surgery to investigate the possibility of being intersex. When preparing papers to be archived, she deliberately included documents with Murray’s own personal reflections and experiences with multiple gender and sexual identities.

Murray’s queer side is discussed in many more books, including American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism by Nancy Ordover and To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America by Lillian Faderman, and in the play “To Buy the Sun: The Challenge of Pauli Murray” by Lynden Harris.

The saint’s best known book is Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (1956), a memoir of growing up as a mixed-race person in the segregated South. As a black family biography, it was a precursor to the blockbuster “Roots.”

Murray also wrote an award-winning memoir titled “Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage,” which was published posthumously and reissued in 2018. That year brought the reissue of her book “Dark Testament and Other Poems,” which was first published in 1970 and long unavailable.

Pauli Murray became an attorney and met “spiritual mate” A graduate of New York’s Hunter College, Murray was rejected from the University of North Carolina UNC Chapel Hill’s graduate school in 1938 because of race. Eager to become a civil rights lawyer, Murray applied as a woman to Howard University in Washington, DC and became the only woman in the law school class there. Despite graduating first in the class of 1944, Murray was rejected by Harvard because they didn’t accept women — even though President Franklin Roosevelt wrote a letter of support after Murray contacted First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Instead Murray studied law at the University of California in Berkeley, and began a friendship with Eleanor that lasted a quarter century. Murray wrote numerous influential publications, and NAACP used Murray’s ideas in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case that ended racial segregation in U.S. public schools. In the late 1950s, Murray began a loving relationship with “best friend” Irene (Renee) Barlow, the office manager at the law firm where Murray worked. Both were active Episcopalians when they met. They never lived together, but the interracial couple attended church together and maintained a relationship for almost 17 years until Barlow’s death from cancer in 1973. Murray described Barlow as a “spiritual mate.” She wrote a piece called “A Christian Friendship” for Barlow’s memorial booklet, declaring, “As one of the many friends blessed by Irene Barlow’s loving kindness, I was given both the high privilege—and the pain— of a Christian partnership of nearly seventeen years in which two independent spirits meshed when necessary and disengaged when it no longer crucial to act as a unit.”

Murray’s ongoing friendship with Roosevelt is described in the 2016 book, “The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice” by women’s studies professor Patricia Bell-Scott.

In the early 1960s President John Kennedy appointed Murray to the Commission on the Status of Women Committee. The future saint worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin on civil rights — and criticized the 1963 March on Washington at the time for excluding women from leadership. In 1965 Murray became the first African American to receive a law doctorate from Yale. A year later Murray co-founded the National Organization for Women. Before becoming a Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg relied on Murray’s legal arguments to win the Reed v. Reed case, a major milestone in prohibiting sex discrimination.

Pauli Murray had a second career as a priest The death of beloved spiritual mate Irene Barlow led Murray to change careers from law to ministry. Instead of retiring, she launched a new career at age 62. The grieving lawyer entered New York’s General Theological Seminary in 1973, the same year that Barlow died — and before the Episcopal Church allowed women priests. Murray was ordained in 1977 and celebrated Holy Eucharist for the first time at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, NC — the same church where Murray’s grandmother, an enslaved person, was baptized.

After a lifetime as a human rights activist, Murray drew on personal experience to preach a powerful vision of God’s justice. It can be difficult to locate her sermons in books. Eight of them can be found in the readily available book “Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850-1979,” edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas. Sermons by Murray in the book are Male and Female He Created Them (1978), Women Seeking Admission to Holy Orders as Crucifers Carrying the Cross (1974), Mary Has Chosen the Best Part (1977), The Holy Spirit (1977), The Gift of the Holy Spirit (1977), The Dilemma of the Minority Christian (1974), Salvation and Liberation (1979), and Can These Bones Live Again (1978).

A 1977 sermon recorded in the hard-to-find Pauli Murray: Selected Sermons and Writings includes these lines:

It was my destiny to be the descendant of slave owners as well as slaves, to be of mixed ancestry, to be biologically and psychologically integrated in a world where the separation of the races was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States as the fundamental law of our Southland. My entire life’s quest has been for spiritual integration, and this quest has led me ultimately to Christ, in whom there is no East or West, no North or South, no Black or White, no Red or Yellow, no Jew or Gentile, no Islam or Buddhist, no Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, or Roman Catholic, no Male or Female. There is no Black Christ, no White Christ, no Red Christ – although these images may have transitory cultural value. There is only Christ, the Spirit of Love.

Murray died of cancer on July 1, 1985 at age 74 in a house co-owned with lifelong friend Maida Springer Kemp in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Murray and spiritual mate Irene Barlow are said to be buried together under the same headstone in an interracial cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

In the Bible, believers are referred to as saints. The Episcopal faith was at one time a Godly religious entity. I’m sure there have been many Christian Episcopalians, and there must still be some. ( Though they need to join a church that believes the Bible is true, instead.)

Eh…what?

Saints are those in heaven. There are no living saints. To achieve heaven one must follow the will of God.

I mean how do people make this crap up

They’re calling this woman an episcopal saint. I’ve never heard of such a thing

In catholicism a saint is one who is dead and has gone through an investigation to prove they’ve gone to heaven There are many saint undeclared whom no one has taken the effort to prove they’re saints but they are

The episcopal s have a way of checking this out?

This is a LIe!

“Murray was arrested and jailed for refusing to sit in the back of a segregated bus in Virginia in 1938 — 15 years before Rosa Parks became a national symbol for resisting bus segregation. This makes Murray the first African American to use non-violent action to challenge Jim-Crow segregation.

LEFT LIAR TO MAKE A LESBIAN LOOK LIKE A HERO.
Today is the anniversary of Elizabeth Jennings’ death.
BTW the lawyer that won her case was a Young White REPUBLICAN named Chester A. Arthur a future Republican president. This is why Jennings is never credited with being the first Black American to refuse to follow Jim Crow laws in America.
Here heroism took place is DEMOCRAT New York City.

Elizabeth Jennings Graham (March 1830 – June 5, 1901) was an African-American teacher and civil rights figure.
In 1854, Graham insisted on her right to ride on an available New York City streetcar at a time when all such companies were private and most operated segregated cars. Her case was decided in her favor in 1855, and it led to the eventual desegregation of all New York City transit systems by 1865.
Graham later started the city’s first kindergarten for African-American children, operating it from her home on 247 West 41st Street until her death in 1901.

The Left truly is merely the Right inverted. This is why they always champion causes they see as "transgressive." And it seems they really want to see melanin as transgressive as homosexuality.

It seems that working for "social justice" doesn't count unless you're also working for immorality.

I’m not saying this woman is a saint. No way. But in the Bible, Paul addresses most of his letters, “To the saints in...”. The word saint is hagios, and means holy, set apart.
hágios – properly, different (unlike), other (”otherness”), holy; for the believer, (hágios) means “likeness of nature with the Lord” because “different from the world.”

The fundamental (core) meaning of “40 [Strong’s reference number] (hágios) is “different” – thus a temple in the 1st century was hagios (”holy”) because different from other buildings (Wm. Barclay). In the NT, 40 /hágios (”holy”) has the “technical” meaning “different from the world” because “like the Lord.” (See Bible Hub, Strong’s Concordance)

Or do you think Paul was writing his letters to those already in Heaven?

There’s an entire religion founded by Jesus Himself which solidly keeps saints as those who have been sanctified and are in heaven

This article refers to this militant homosexual as an episcopal saint

There is a push for people to normalize homosexuality and in this case as a sanctifying quality.

I am saying I’ve never heard of an episcopal saint. You’re talking about something different
Below is a simple google search result

You can take it or leave it. But stop talking to me.

“ As used more broadly by Paul in his epistles, the term “saints” (meaning ones who have been sanctified, or set apart, for service to God) applies to all Christians everywhere — whether Jew or Gentile. Their sanctification indicates that, by virtue of being Christians, they are “in the world”, but not “of the world” (that is living in the world, but no longer a part of the “world system”, which is generally characterized by godlessness and immorality).”

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